The strategic value of a Multi-Commerce CMS
3 reasons why you want your CMS to be able to talk to multiple Commerce Systems

It is no secret that Content and Commerce collide as soon as customer experience becomes your strategic focus. So, it shouldn’t even be a debate that your CMS and your commerce platform must be smoothly integrated. However, I will argue that this doesn’t go far enough. You also want your CMS also to be seamlessly integrated into other commerce platforms, regardless of whether you plan to use them or not. Here is why:
I. Integrate more easily after Mergers & Acquisitions

Today, we experience the most dynamic business environment ever, with an endless flow of mergers and acquisitions. In such a dynamic environment, does anyone know what their future will look like? In any case, don’t expect your next acquisition to share the same commerce platform you use today.
Some of our multi-brand clients ran into this scenario and looked for help. Fortunately, a Multi-Commerce CMS can address a big part of this problem by consolidating the experience layer in front of diverse commerce backends. This enables you to harmonize experiences globally, reduce operating costs, and open up opportunities to consolidate your commerce platforms more easily in the future.
A Multi-Commerce CMS also allows you to roll out new customer experiences globally for multiple brands with different commerce platforms — all at the same time.
II. Choose the right tool for the right market

Another challenge faced by our global clients is the deployment of different commerce platforms in different markets. Not all markets have the same requirements or the same scale. So, they decided to deploy different platforms in different markets instead of accepting a one-size-fits-all approach. Often, we see IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP Hybris or Salesforce Commerce Cloud being used for major markets and Magento for smaller ones.
A Multi-Commerce CMS covers this scenario in an efficient way. You can manage all your content centrally, then build attractive experiences once and seamlessly deploy them with multiple commerce systems globally.
This makes it easy to run global campaigns quickly and efficiently without having to struggle with different commerce platforms.
III. Don’t get stuck with your commerce platform

Maybe you enjoy working with your current commerce platform — or perhaps you don’t. In any case, you don’t want to be stuck with it. A lot of things might change: you uncover new business requirements, head in a new strategic direction, do a merger or discover a new technology you want to take advantage of. Whatever it is, the more agile you are, the better.
A Multi-Commerce CMS significantly improves your strategic position by unshackling you from your existing commerce platform and opening up more strategic options for the future.
We’ve heard from clients that think commerce platforms are becoming a commodity, while unique experiences have become an imperative. Headless commerce architectures are popular with brands an retailers. By separating the user experience from the commerce backend, less expensive and time consuming customisations are needed within the commerce system. With a Multi-Commerce CMS you can directly take advantage of this trend.
Even if you only want to move from an on-premise deployment of IBM WebSphere Commerce to IBM Digital Commerce/Commerce on Cloud, you will appreciate the agility that a Multi-Commerce CMS gives you. You can run multiple catalogues from different commerce systems in parallel — and test your new commerce platform with the same content you continue to produce for the old one. You can do that until you’re ready to switch and won’t lose a single day of content editing.
You might think that you’ll never switch your commerce platform. And maybe you won’t. But from a strategic perspective, isn’t it better to at least have the option. As Darwin taught us: being agile is the most critical element of survival.
That brings us back to the beginning. A Multi-Commerce CMS is a strategic win for every company.
About CoreMedia
CoreMedia offers a market-leading Multi-Commerce CMS and has become a preferred content management vendor in the luxury, fashion and beauty space. We enable the global market leader in luxury online retail, YOOX Net-A-Porter (YNAP), to build outstanding customer experiences. Boots and dm drugstores also chose CoreMedia for their online stores and in-store kiosks. Fashion brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and an iconic Italian footwear company all updated their digital shopping experiences with CoreMedia as well. And this trend didn’t stop at B2C. B2B brands like Graybar and Emerson have adapted the same technology to massively improve their B2B eCommerce experience.
Today, CoreMedia offers out-of-the-box integrations with leading commerce platforms like IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento, plus reference implementations for SAP YaaS and home-grown systems. CoreMedia’s Digital Experience Platform enables brands and retailers to seamlessly add sophisticated content management to their existing store — efficiently and fast.
CoreMedia — Content matters
